


Curdled Milk

by Aris



Series: self defense mechanisms [2]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Anorexia, Bittersweet Ending, Body Image, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Depression, Eating Disorders, Heavy Angst, M/M, Post-Grand Prix Final, Queer platonic relationships, Side Yuuri/Victor, Starvation, Suicidal Thoughts, Unreliable Narrator, aris cant fucking write, yuri-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2018-09-11 04:57:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8954539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aris/pseuds/Aris
Summary: Somewhere between a meal he didn't eat and a practice that ended two hours ago, he died. And he came back, without bruises from failed jumps and without the certainty of winning; he was reborn perfect, lacking. As someone who can strive for more and nothing else. As someone who hungers.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **NOT standalone. carry on from[Reincarnate](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8411371)**

With every exhale his ribs crack just a little around his frantically heaving lungs, jamming themselves into soft, oxygenated skin. He can't catch a breath, finds respiration fails to keep his attention over his burning legs, the ache of his thighs, the brittleness that expands inside him like a helium balloon until, abruptly, on one desperate inhale, it shatters. Breaks out in his throat like tiny shards of glass, and he finds a sob catches tight at his airways before his eyes are scrunching to contain a high he is unable to fit inside himself;

Tears are warm. The ground beneath his knees is cold.

He meets Lilia's eyes, she mouths;

"Beautiful, Yuri."

###### 

He wins.

A girl places a medal around his neck, he ascends a platform flagged by Yuuri and Leroy. He runs this through his head again as cameras flash - he wins, a medal is placed around his neck, Yuuri is besides him, below him. They hand him flowers, like they do at funerals. Around his bouquet, his knuckles are trembling and he tucks them carefully behind the angle of his arms, the crease of the plastic wrappings. Cameras flash, and when they record he is as still as the ice he stands upon.

The crowd doesn't throw flowers like they did for Victor. They cheer, and his ears ache, but they don't throw flowers and there's a bruise forming against the side of his calf where he fell, where he failed to land a quadruple toe loop as if he hasn't been perfecting them for longer than he cares to recall. If it weren't for that bruise, they would have thrown flowers.

He clings tight to the blooms at his breast, wonders if he quite deserves the brush of petals through his costume.

Yuuri doesn't say anything to him, winds up in Victors arms as if Yuri didn't just pull apart every little boasting promise he'd made over the season; as if Yuri didn't win, in the end, in that little competition amongst themselves. Prove himself better. It's hollow. Victor's attention wasn't the be all and end all, and yet there's still a horrible bitterness laying at the back of his tongue as he accepts a hug from Yakov, a smile from Lilia. There's no reason for them to congratulate him, keep playing at that friendly facade they had been dancing around since they were placed together; Yuuri got Victor, Yuri got gold. Fair. They're even.

He hates that that isn't enough.

###### 

After reporters, after parties, after interviews and congratulations through clenched teeth and grinning, warm couples who incited physical contact as if they were _friends_ \- after that, Yuri is quite suddenly alone.

His room overlooks the city.

The Sagrada Família is visible, lit up in stark touristy lights. The strange patterns in the stone cast twisted shadows that seem nonsensical to the eye, and Yuri remembers Otabek telling him, in that quiet way of his, about the Spanish civil war. About the workforce carving through stone blocks, about tiny cracks in its foundations to massive breakaways of the spires; he remembers his warm hand on his arm, casual, unaware of how much of an oddity it is to touch Yuri Plisetksy.

Fingerprints leave tiny, thermal markings on the large window panes as he withdraws his palm. Warmth has a tendency to linger. He lets the sleeves of his jumper fall over his fingers, digits that are finally free to tremble. His legs are locked in place by poorly cooled down muscle, simultaneously begging at him to sit down, to rest - replenish, revive.

He won, he won, he won.

He did it, he actually -- he killed himself. He cut himself down to the bone, down to muscle tough enough he couldn't lodge a knife into. He bled over leggings and skates and shirts he can never wear again, and somewhere between a meal he didn't eat and a practice that ended two hours ago, he died. And he came back, without bruises from failed jumps and without the certainty of winning; he was reborn perfect, lacking. As someone who can strive for more and nothing else. 

As someone who _hungers._

This hunger has driven him this far, to tears and gold, but he is still so, so empty. As of this moment, there are very few places which are higher. The youngest to ever win a gold in the junior Grand Prix finals, the highest short program score. He has only Victor to beat, but within himself there is not the energy to move to the bed, let alone contemplate skating and winning again and again for years with Victor against him. Not when he must die every time.

_People who can be reborn as many times as necessary are the strong ones._

Yuri is not sure how much longer he can be strong. He doesn't entertain the prospect lightly, feels his skin crinkle into a scowl in a flip-switch reaction out of his unwinding control, but it is a heavy reality he refuses to face away from. His hair is longer, he is minutely taller, the measurements on his waist drop from sheer will and his bones press outwards as if in a daunting promise to become more. Yuri imagines they are straining to grow, to widen his frame and thicken their marrow, to add onto scales and record books for people to glance over as they search up that new junior skater, the one who got the gold;

_Yuri Plisetsky_

_16 years old_

_163cm_

_128lbs_

This is not sustainable. Somewhere, he always gains. Loses. He picks at his hands, scrapes over the skin till white lines and then something richer, until he is spilling out in more ways than one. He's not crying, he's not bleeding, and he was right - he could win. He did win.

This is him, winning.

(This is him, wondering that, if he were to die today, he'd end his career perfectly.)

###### 

The lock screen of his phone is full. Yakov called him, Lilia called him, Victor called him (once, he called him once, and Yuri - Yuri is fine with that). There are unknown numbers and people from the rink back home. Mila sends him pictures of himself on the podium, and she asks him why he wasn't smiling.

He stares hard at the frown on his face. He might have been thinking about flowers. Carefully, with measured movements, he zooms in on the dip at his ribs, the shadows of his collarbones. With the verge of his nail, he traces the space between his thighs with his ankles together, waving out at a crowd that doesn't want him there. He hates that all he can notice is that one angle where his stomach appears elongated, where the cut of his legs isn't quite thin enough - Lilia repeats to him, while he stretches, that ballerinas must always be ready to photograph.

She might have said that to end the scowls he pulls when she talks to him his inadequacies, when she neatly recognizes his beliefs to align with hers. Yuri is not a ballerina, no, he has to be more. If there is a next time, a potential in his burst capillaries and deficient skeleton, that is when he will get it right. He picks about his form, and he phones his grandfather.

On the hotel notepad, he writes down quadruple toe loop. He lets himself smile at his grandfather's voice, treasures the eye crinkles and the ache of his jaw as he he vents his excitement into an easy going persona he can only embody for his family; he is sixteen, he won the Grand Prix Finals, he's still learning maths and focusing down on Russian Literature classes, but he's also the youngest person ever to win gold at this level. He remembers he can be excited. He can be happy.

His grandfather promises to cook for him, when he comes home. He pulls the skin of his stomach out in one hand, bites down on it with his nails, and agrees like he should into the phone line. He used to tell himself, when he saw something he wanted to eat, or when the pain got a touch on the side of too much, _later_. After I win. When I beat Yuuri, Victor. For a while now, long before Barcelona, it has been _never_.

I can't eat that.

I won't eat that.

It's easier to cut it out forever than it is to deprive himself temporarily. That allows space for mistakes, for moments of weakness where he can indulge without morals. Without working for it. And he won't do that to himself, break down the iron clad discipline he has destroyed himself to attain. It is his to own. Obsess over. To integrate into his personality until it is a quirk or a personality flaw, something people take for granted, ignore. Something people will not worry about.

(Sickly, he acknowledges no one would worry, anyway)

Below hoards of texts and calls and notifications, Otabek asks if he would like to go for a ride.

Yuri accepts.

###### 

They drive out along a road adjacent to Parque del Guinardo. Otabek wheels his bike off from the road, carefully guides the heavy machinery down a small dirt trail only a little away from the road and one that descends into trees and interspersed underbrush. His tendons strain against his skin, his arms strong but reddening where he supports its weight. His face remains neutral, the struggle non-reflective, and Yuri almost reaches out to help - but his eyes catch on the bandage around his palm, the awkward way in which his wrist bones protrude and how his knuckles catch the dusting sunlight from in between the leaves above them. Their shadows are fragmented, beckon hollows deeper than reality between each finger.

He stops, and he stares at his limb. Otabek moves ahead. He forms a fist, lets it fall back at his side. He forgets, sometimes, how selfish he is. How much he gets caught up in himself.

Otabek is propping his bike up against a tree when he catches up, staring out at the view of Barcelona below them. He doesn't say congratulations, or well done, instead he asks Yuri:

"Do you like it up here?"

"We only just got here," And he frowns at the clean cut lines of Otabek's hair. The symmetrical lines bother him - too neat, blades pressed to warm skin.

"You don't like it?" His voice is deeper in Russian, compared to the strangely shaped vowels he formed speaking English to reporters and non-Russian skaters. It is more private like this, Otabek talking to him, for him. Intimate, in a way Yuri won't consider. Instead, he steps up closer to the edge of this clearing he has been brought to.

Like all nature in Spain, the trees appear as if on the cusp of dehydration. Their branches are thin and gangly like starved limbs, but the leaves dye in dark colours obscured only by dust, they are small but many and filter out the mounting heat of the suns rays. The provided tibits of shade are what allow Yuri to look back against from where the sun beams, and take in the sight of a sprawling city just below them.

It's ugly in the way which cities tend to be; busy, mismatched time periods slotted together, merged with mortar. Half-hearted nature preservation on street corners, brightly green among the more common sandy building palettes. Clean divides between different sectors, like a chess board slowly dissolving into an endless sprawl at its edges. Behind humanity, the sea stretches out languidly to blend with the sky in an almost boring blue-grey.

"It's nothing special,"

Otabek lets that lie between them comfortably, neither agreeing or disagreeing. His eyes seem unfocused, taken by some far away sight, but the slant to his usually clinically straight eyebrows is soft. A little curved. It changes the lines of his features til Yuri can almost picture the way his jaw could shift to accommodate that smile he'd grasped for a brief instance during his performance.

It's nice, he finds. That constructed imagery.

Yuri is not built for silence. He mimics it well, the unapproachable, matches their loft jaws and straining necks. Moves his hands in sequences, smooths down against his thighs, contains his touches to himself, running the soft pads of fingers against the screen of his phone. He works words into his mouth, one which are abrupt and unforgiving - truths, ones he doesn't need to part with. Gestures which isolate him further, build up under a one sided sneer; if he is distant, harsh, as cold as he feels, no one can doubt him.

To be weak is to be human - poets echo this as if to rejoice their vulnerabilities. Inside, he knows he is tender, rubs himself a little rawer with each withdraw, but it is still so new to him. To be born again with himself, alongside humility he stumbles with, novel prospects of empathy expression he fails to ration; too much, not enough. He hates this, now, hates his hate and hates himself. He longs for impartiality, to be be the bull in the china shop, but now he cracks to droplets of water, to caresses of winds. He is less like a diamond and more like glass.

He is forged from the tiny pieces he tore himself into, melted into flawless transparency. He thinks this is how Otabek can read him so easily despite the relative brevity of their friendship.

"How long until your return to Russia?" Otabek asks him, and Yuri knows the other man could have happily sat in their shared quiet for the entire time, doesn't feel the itch at his throat the same Yuri does in anothers company for too long. It is why he is better alone, where he cannot bare his neck with one word too many.

With Otabek, it is subtly different.

"In a few days," And he holds his tongue against what he wants to share, waits.

Otabek tilts his head towards him.

"Are you looking forward to going home?"

(Otabek smiles when Yuri tells him about his cat, left with a skater friend of Mila's back near the rink. He lets Yuri show him pictures from his Instagram of the elegant cat in silly positions, and though Yuri flicks back to his face every other moment to check if he's bored, he never seems anything but warmly interested. Yuri doesn't have the word to describe the considerations of someone he wants the attention of. 

He's never had to describe it before.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anyone else love suffering,,
> 
> okay! so I wasn't going to write a sequel but after watching episode 12 and then having to see everyone go off about victor and yuuri and ignoring yuri winning (like i wanted him to from the start go My Guy ٩(^ᴗ^)۶) i got really really sad for yuri because like,, his achievements get ignored a lot in favour of yuuri+victor. he's a vulnerable kid and i project really hard and he deserves a lot better . 
> 
> some things i compulsively have to mention:  
> \- i dunno what positive emotions are or how to write them  
> \- wtf the fuck is plot  
> \- title from [nicole dollanganger](https://nicoledollanganger.bandcamp.com/album/curdled-milk) but i listened to a lot of [mouth wound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_ACTCi5jqM)
> 
>  
> 
> [tumblr](http://killuay.tumblr.com/)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 05/01/2017 - edits made ! 550 words added overall.
> 
> 06/01/2017 - MORE EDITS 422 words added.
> 
> new scene at the end. everything else is sentenc edits for flow throughout

This is a recovery period.

"Get some rest, you deserve it," Yakov tells him, and Yuri's not too sure on who decided what he deserves and what he doesn't, and when rest became something he had to deserve - "We'll return to a relaxed training program in a month,"

The _'don't get fat'_ is more implied than anything. He's told to stay in shape. Not to slack too much. Catch up on school work. Competing for months at a time is not convenient for education and Yuri does not particularly care for it, though he learns it can be somewhat satisfying to be knowledgeable than others.  The tutor he is assigned is one he has had for years; she is very kind and never responds to Yuri's frustrated tongue, and because of this she is one of the handful people Yuri cannot help but feel weak around. There are few things he hates more than feeling stupid, though they exist, and it takes a grating effort every time he must ask for help, admit he doesn't understand.  But still she smiles at him frequently and explains in a measured tone that is not too fast to catch but not so slow as if to patronize him, and she does that like his stupidity isn't somehow repulsive, indicative of some deeper flaw.

These people who are soft, who are strong in their kindness. He cannot understand them.

With this, he crams months into days. He's not smart naturally, finds concepts hard to grasp and dates elusive to his memory, but if he doesn't give it his all now, among practices and rehearsals he won’t otherwise have the time to cram everything into his head. On his morning runs, he sorts through cue cards burned into his eyes - key words, text book definitions, how a certain phrasing in a question asks for a very specific answer. He pants historical figures into the arm of his jacket on a cold bridge, bites down hard on his lip as he jogs past a bakery and tries to remember all the buzzwords for explaining photophosphorylation, ignoring how the smell reminds him of his grandad.

To produce energy from light. To be free of heterotrophy - a dependence on other beings he resents. He is jealous of plants in a stupid, childish way, and he tears a leaf to shreds between his nervous hands in a park. The scent of sticky phloem refuses to wash off until his skin is almost bloody.

His knuckles are still dry from the harsh cleaning when Mila forwards him a link from a fansite. The tiny icon that accompanies it is a blurry rendition of a slight, familiar figure. He selects the article, watches the tiny blue bar to load up, and stares at the title as his cat brushes her tail against his trembling thighs.

**YURI PLISETSKY: DOPING HIS WAY TO GOLD**

There are two pictures of him in what he vaguely recognises as one of his exercising outfits, perhaps from earlier this week or last. The caption reads: _an emaciated Yuri still training tirelessly_ and _ready to drop?_ His figure is unrecognizable from what he faces the mirror with, and it feels intrusive to have others comment on the gap between his thighs, the salience of his knees and collarbones. The article, helpfully, zooms in on the low res images and circles alleged dark circles below his eyes, the clawed fist of his hand.

Apparent evidence of his drug addiction.

He reads through it with a forced detachment, noting that though the title suggests doping, all the article comments on are symptoms of addiction non-typical for performance enhancing drugs. It's -- the title is damning clickbait, but with very little to actually say. It's not a major publication, more of a gossip site than anything, and though his pulse feels like it's chipping at the back of his teeth it's so damn high in his throat, it's not like it's going to go viral. He ignores the obscene angle of his hipbone in a zoomed-in picture, ignores the strange leaping pride, and exits the tab back to Mila.

 

_You're looking awfully thin, tiger_

_> > The idiots wouldn't know how to take a good picture if Ivanova herself showed them_

_Ivanova? Someone has been spending too much time with Lilia_

 

She's not wrong. Yuri had become used to living with Lilia and her high standards in even the tiniest aspects of everyday living, and it feels like something is missing when he performs his routine in life without her to prod and poke at his form. He misses her (or rather notices more sorely her lack of presence; missing is not something he can fully associate with her) the most around meal times, where she cannot stare him down at the suggestion of an extra helping, where he doesn't hear the comforting run through of the perfectly balanced macronutrients he's consuming. A full amino acid profile, extra protein for practice days and still a good amount on rest days to mend the fraying of his muscles as he pushes and pushes.

At home, he has a significantly less structured meal plan. He thinks this might be the freest he has ever been to eat, a month away from his coaches and all whom he has come to know through skating. It's strangely indescribable, but the absence of his mother makes the decisions easier; Yuri himself can cook very little, is perhaps too used to others doing it in his stead. He recreates meals he has come to know well throughout the prior months, but does so clumsily, finding vegetables harsh and overcooked in his mouth, meats bland and chewy.  He doesn't prepare to enjoy, though, and he cuts his fish into minuscule pieces, can’t bring himself to indulge in the rich meat when he could otherwise eat vegetables. They are light, mostly water as they crush beneath his teeth.

He halves his training portions. Scrapes off what's left on his dish into the bin - it had been drilled into him by his family never to waste food, and Yuri morbidly wonders if that applies to anything he allows himself to have. A waste. But his mother is never home, and he doesn’t notice her absence, not at all. He counts his calories, compares it to arbitrary numbers; under five-hundred, a good day. One calorie over and it's a bad day, a day he needs to make up for later. He doesn't know when he made up that cut off for himself, but it needed to be somewhere - right?

It doesn't matter, as long as he is able to function, can run his miles and study his work and patch together on lined paper his mistakes. Quadruple toe loop is pride of place at the top of wrinkled note, footwork underlined below -

The score margin of 0.12 is too small, Yuri not small enough.

(He finds himself ignoring the texts from Otabek, asking if he's okay. If he's seen the article(s). Yuri only replies when it's something else, sends a picture of his cat looking cute. Otabek lets him. Yuri doesn't know what to do with the obvious concern, learns that his heart can hurt in different ways, better ways.)

 

 

* * *

 

Russia in January is unbelievably cold.

In his room, he reaches out over discarded clothes and plates, towards the ceiling and then to the dips of his ankles. The commentaries love his flexibility, hype the crowd with talk of how few male skaters can perform the Biellmann Spin as Yuri longs for the ice under his skates to remain pure, unmarked. His weight merely a coexistence to the surfacing sheen, rather than a burden to its integrity; he is always let down by these reminders of his presence. He cuts the ice, like he does with everything that draws too close.

_Up, up, up._

His muscles ache with the fear of an impending future where he will not be able to scrunch and elongate himself into static shapes. Flesh tearing where is should stretch, deterioration where there was only once regeneration. Yuri cradles the pain within him. If it hurts, then he is doing it right, and oh god, does everything hurt these days.

Lilia will be proud.

(He watches fuzzy videos on youtube, performances of a younger Lilia. Her tights dip in at her calves, almost fail to cling to all the contours of her knees. Her ribcage is visible, macabre-ly so, and she swoops and falls and bends with sweat disappearing into the abysses of her clavicle. It's so enchanting he loses his place in the musical, cannot find the plot when Lilia drifts onto the stage, twirls with a precision as sharp as her cheekbones. She is a Prima Ballerina. He wants to ask her how she did it. Why she settled for Yuri when he is so far from his zenith - when he was nowhere this close.

In front of the mirror, he bends his back towards the floor. He can almost see his entire rib alignment press against his skin. He presses back, sucks in, feels dizzy at he imagines his diaphragm just beneath his palm.)

And; Russia in January is unbelievably cold, but Yuri never remembers feeling it all the way to the bone quite like he does now. Under thermals and sweaters and fresh from long runs, he shivers. His hands tremble too much to make a warm drink, and so he sits next to a steaming shower, bathroom door closed to lock the heat in. If he sinks all the way to the ground, he doesn't have to catch his reflection in the small mirror above the faucet - doesn't have to bear witness to how long his hair has become, the shadows under his eyes. The tiled walls are an aching pain against the knobs of his spine, but Yuri has been living with blisters and bruises and blood since he could feel them.

He curls up tightly, and when his fingers are able to move a touch more readily, ruddy and damp, he flicks through the updates on his phone. Victor in some kind of Japanese restaurant, the cut off shoulder next to him obviously belonging to Yuuri. JJ with a lipstick stain on his cheek, Phichit and Guang smiling gaudily, faces pressed together. He hyper-focuses on the small icons of his email, doesn't feel whatever is lurking inside.

Yuri is used to being alone. He is made for it.

His camera roll is screenshots of himself - with a medal, from articles, in white. When he was younger, his mother would complain white is a fattening colour. She would pinch her cheeks and mutter, hang dresses over mirrors and drink sweet wines that would only smell sour to him in skirts that pulled in her waist. Victor had made this white work, tall and slim and the very definition of the fae treasured in story books, nothing like the fairy Yuri is called these days - a plastic ripoff, a modernized lore. Small, marketable, heavy off the tongue in double meanings from men in big coats and cruel smirks when Yuri walks alone.

Bones curl inwards to contain. He is built like his mother, his grandad would tell him, and Yuri wants to burn that out. Their resemblance. Slice at it with the blades that cut into his palms, choke out the persistent saccharine flavour of her precious homemade ptichye moloko, gag until that creaminess has razed itself from his body. Gone before it worms under his veins in off-white fat. His anger is borne of something so hollow it leaks, consumes, spreads out from him and into others on the sharp edges of his tongue; she taught him how to hate like this. He has always been good at mimicking - his mother, Victor, whoever’s personality he needs to chip away at to engulf within himself. He's not sure who he really is, inside. It didn't used to matter so much, and lately it's like he can't help but feel a little too much of everything.

Or nothing. He feels so much nothing that the slightest brush of sadness is a magnifying glass over a raindrop, an ocean at his neck. Yuri has never felt so weak, even the cold comfort of anger billowing him in guilt and the following drive to isolate himself. Some kind of heroes complex he doesn't understand, the need to shield others from the monstrosity he shares too easily. It's unlike him, or who he thinks he is.

So, so, _so_ \- he reaches up to his ceiling, stretches out, and he's cold, and alone, and that's how it should be.

Has always been.

 

* * *

 

 

The move back to skating is alike to stepping out from an overhang into a drenching rain. He's not sure when he started drowning at his mother’s house, but the air of St Petersburg is much too fresh, cold, stings at his nose and bare fingertips. He can't quite pull the dry air into his lungs, coughs into his concealed palms that cradle his mouth. Air pressure, high to low, but he's too tired to remember the rest - gradients, diaphragms, slick pleura.

His first day in St Petersburg, he drops his stuff and his cat back at Lilia's place under the watchful eye of a scowling Yakov, and makes for the ice an hour before the rink is technically supposed to close. Technically, because it is only ever closed to Team Russia when the ice is being re-patched and frozen. He changes alone in the locker rooms, drinks in the familiar smell of sweat and damp showers, runs a hand over a dent on a changing bench he inflicted years ago. Cut wood never heals, and he plays at the edges of his leggings where they slack more than they should.

He should buy new ones - a tight form is everything. Slack clothes remind him of Yuuri, of Japan. A weight loss program he watched from afar, a guilt that now curdles in his gut as he considers the time he spent there, laughing at Yuuri when he should have been working just as hard as him. Harder. He used to think Yuuri underestimated him, now he knows the opposite is true. He hates that he is very much the child he had always vehemently denied being.

When he steps out onto the rink, the way his skate slides across the ice as if weighs nothing frees an anxiety curled so tightly at his solar plexus he'd hardly noticed it. His ponytail sways against the back of his neck, a familiar chill creeps up the sides of his ankles and this is home, this is where he spent his childhood, sprawled out on the ice more than held in the arms of others. Bruises over kisses. The tundra he was hew from.

"Yuri!"

The call catches his attention, and he weaves past Georgi on his practice laps as he looks over to, possibly, one of the last people he wanted to see. The silvery Russian waves at him, dopey smile in place as it always seems to be, and the anxiety is back so startlingly fast he forgets to breathe for a moment, his heart a caged bird beneath the visible curve of his chest. It aches, too, when he approaches and spots a dark blotch of hair knelt over skates behind Victor.

"Victor," he greets, propping his arms onto the rink's sides. He spends a second too long comparing the size of their arms, the objective gracefulness of bone versus muscle, and is frustrated to find Victor's still seem more appealing. Carved from marble, he read once in an magazine. They fancy him a God, the media, cast Victor in lights Yuri can only dream of catches the shadows of.

"How was home?" Victor asks, eyes crinkling into friendly semi circles.

"Fine," Yuri replies quickly, looking up from the delicate lines that run down his nails, "The pig trains here now?" And he gestures his head towards Yuuri still tying his skates, seemingly unaware of Yuri's presence. Vaguely, he registers a relief that he doesn't have to hear this - his posturing, an immature attempt as smoothing over an old hurt.

Victor's smile gains a slight edge, "For now. There are more resources here for him,” Yuri hums out a response, stretching his legs in small movements, revelling in the heavy pull of the skate dragging his bone back to a standing alignment. It's heady, the casual ache of an existence upon the ice. Impatience to get back out, to practice jumps - a quadruple toe loop - rings up his spine, trills in the empty spaces of his jaw. The high that had fell from grace with Victor’s interruption begs to be free once more.

A hand is placed against his arm, Victor isn't smiling anymore.

"Yuri, you do not look so well, have you been i-"

"I'm fine." Yuri cuts him off, ignores the shake in his elbow as he frees his arms from Victor and moves away from the side, catching sight of Yuuri looking up "I want to skate, and your fiancé is waiting. " He takes off, air caressing up his back where his shirt swirls around him. His tongue tastes like blood, an echo of how sharp he was with Victor. Too much, and though he knows the older skater won't be upset with it, he's worried what Victor will say to others. One word that he's unwell and trying to hide it to someone like Yakov and he's off the ice and seeing their rink's nurse, nutritionist and physiotherapist before he can blink. Yakov is funny like that, beneath his roughness he cares – whether that is borne from his desire to produce world renown skaters or genuine affection, Yuri knows not.

But he is fine. He knows he is. Never been better, in fact, even if his vision blackens when he stands. This is what it takes, to keep dying, to keep being reincarnated as a better version of himself each time; this is the pain of personal growth, a searing at a cellular level, something far more exquisite than the hormones carelessly ravaging this body he has worked so hard to train. He has to be fine, or he has done this for nothing, has let slip a part of himself he cannot salvage. The pain, the worry that plagues him occasionally are things he can fix; vitamins, sugar free energy drinks, caffeine pills and bitter teas. They’re soothing in their routine, the feeling that he is looking after his body despite refining it to its very boundaries; if he takes the pills and brews his teas then the dizziness is a problem that is being fixed. His nails aren’t breaking off, and his hair is not falling out, and he’s only cold because it’s _cold,_ because he’s in an ice rink, because he’s in Russia in winter.

On another lap, when his thighs feel warm and stretched enough to jump, he comes down from a triple axle that felt all too much like flying with the way his head spins, and catches Yuuri's eyes from across the arena. Victor is lent in, whispering something in his ear, and the static in his head buzzes louder and louder. He sees Victor's head turning but he glances away, a delicate flush webbing out down his neck. He knows when he's been talked about, has caught stares and whispers and cupped hands enough to figure out when his fellow skaters are criticizing him in their little social circles; they say, he's a Victor copycat, just another _kid_ who'll disappear, too _angry_ , too _mean_ , a _brat._

He's used to it, but somehow, he still feels hollow.

When he looks over again, they're gone.

He tries to enjoy the rest of his time on the ice, readjusting to the redistribution of his weight again the slippery surface, but finds he cannot concentrate fully with Victor and Yuuri passing him by in the rink, sharing looks between each other and towards him. It adds to an underlying feeling of tiredness from his travelling, and abruptly his shoulders are too heavy and his hands are too stiff and he craves to bury his face into the flank of his cat. Longs for safe affection, warm and unconditional. He cools down with the last of his waning energy, lazily lapping the rink before bringing himself to one of the open edges and tugging himself from what he had been hoping would be a reprieve from his thoughts. He tries not to imagine the gashes he leaves behind in the ice, the way he can’t help but feel too heavy for the grace he clumsily mimics.

Yuri sits in the changing room, pinches the flesh of his thigh that spreads out when he sits and wishes he could tear it away.

 

* * *

 

 

Lilia purses her lips when she sees him. Directly, she is the same as usual – scolds Yuri for his messiness in leaving out his case, drills home that neatness in privacy is elegance in public. Indirectly, he catches her eyes on him too often to be comfortable and is glad of the large sweater he had donned to combat the iciness of her home. The ceilings are high and the whole building is some architectural leftover from a stylistic craze or other, with windows too expansive despite the double glazing to really lock in the heat from the wall sized radiators and electric fireplace. His room is bearable, radiator ramped up to an arbitrary setting of five, the highest it will go, but he still seeks out the lingering warm of shower steam, of water that stains his skin in temporary red.

At dinner, he can’t identify what causes the uptick in his heartbeat as a plate, far too large, is set in front of him. Lilia doesn’t list the nutrients, for once, and it displaces the usual feeling of comfort routine meals bring him. He cuts the chicken into long, stranded pieces, winds it round broccoli stalks and shifts it lie besides green beans. Carefully, he chews, feels juice trickle onto his tongue. Across the table, Lillia fixes him with a gaze he breaks short so fast the following silence is almost awkward. He misses Yakov’s presence, his loud eating to fill the careful quiet of Yuri and Lilia in dissection, in the process of necessary evil.

  
“Yuri,” And her voice is like a harsh purr, “How was your diet at home?”

“It was fine,” He copies a scowl stolen from someone else, “I tried to cook the same.”

“You cooked?”

“Yes.” She raises one thin eyebrow, but Yuri doesn’t elaborate. It’s not entirely her business what his family is like, and it’s not unlikely that Yakov had informed her to some extent that, in him going home, he was essentially being left alone, as his grandad lived in Moscow and his mother had always been underwhelmingly involved in his life despite their financial situation. It was with resentment he supported her, not familial ties Nikolai so often spoke of, though not though lack of understanding. He thinks, that family once was something good for the Plitesky’s.

The chicken turns sour on his tongue.

“You have lost muscle. We will begin again in the ballroom before you can skate, Yuri.”

_We will begin again._

To be reborn, he must first die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was meant to be posted earlier I'm sorry this time of year is bad for me ,, on that note im 100% coming back to clean this up and maybe add to it in the future, possibly before chap. 3
> 
> thank you for the feedback on the last chapter i really didn't expect so much >_< i appreciate it a lot thank u!!!
> 
> *i used ptichye moloko because its known as 'bird milk' and the theme for this fic was going to be little birds  
> *ahaaaa what's plot dont know her
> 
>  
> 
> [tumblr](http://killuay.tumblr.com)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ADDED SCENES TO LAST CHAPTER MAKE SURE TO READ THEM BEFORE THIS

 

No one brings up his change in diet.

 

Yuri pays no attention to the nagging sensation of unease that tugs at his stomach as he tells Mila that he’d been ill while away, disguises the white lie with a whiney tone about not being able train as much as he would have liked, apparently stuck in his room for the majority of his leave with his tutor.  Mila’s enough of a gossip he know it’ll get round to Victor, and be extension hopefully Yakov, and maybe then Lilia will stop picking at his lack of muscle.  Mila had made to ruffle his hair – or worse, pinch his cheeks – at the news, and he’d promptly ducked away with a complaint about not being a kid.

 

It’s something he’d become proficient at, since Hot Springs on Ice, weaving under people’s hands and swaying just the right amount away to miss friendly elbows and shoulders; his only intimacy lies in taut skin of Lilia’s hands on the dips of his inner thighs, pulling and pushing till he can hook his ankle to the cold metal bar aligned with his hip. Intimacy is correction, discipline, cool and sharp, leeching something of comfort from beneath his clothes.

 

At night, he has taken to holding his cat close enough to hear the rapid thumps of her heartbeat, his own worrying pitched in his own ears. She is soft and pliant in his grasp, and when the sun refuses to set till the early hours, a staple of Russian winter, he smooths the undersides of his thumb across her ears, ignores the unbearable gnaw inside and delights instead in the soft give beneath his fingertips. Cats are supposed to be like that – soft, warm. They are also sharp and agile, always landing on the pads of their feet, and Yuri wishes he could embody such rivalling traits, imagines light cat bones surfing up against his skin, the slots of his spine flexing and twisting as he runs his fingers between the protrusions. It’s a stupid fantasy, the same he houses when he looks upon birds and their hollow bones, and wishes the air would whistle so easily through him. He craves so desperately to be anymore but his ashen self.

 

Imprisoned in his labouring form, he rolls from his bed every morning, poorly rested and layering in thick clothes to ward away the prying eyes of Lilia and Yakov, their searching comments on his body. They are prone to it, as coaches, and while it once thrilled him to have his progress noted in smiling upticks, it’s all too much now when he is pinched and poked like a performing bear. Broken and bent into the visage of his new program, shaved down harshly to fit into a slimming mould. He hardly feels like he occupies himself anymore, and viciously wishes that were true all the time; he catches the briefest reflections of himself in glass doors, the silver of Yakovs’ watch as they walk, in the reflective blur of scraped ice at the entrance to the rink. He encounters this mirror him, and struggles with the ache brought by the warping forms watching him, accusation in their eyes.

 

Yuri would prefer if he could ignore his own body, but it has been decidedly impossible since he was very young. His livelihood revolved around it. Instead, he bites his tongue and drinks in the breakdowns of meals over fancy porcelain plates the likes of which his mother would snort at, he picks apart the meals in his head, takes what he is given and divides. Today, he os out from the studio and on the ice, so he picks more at his fish, cuts away at the most outer layer garnished with a unmistakable sheen that smells of olive oil. He knows, vaguely, that oils are high in fat and he finds that the flavour rots at the sides of his teeth. It lingers in his mouth, coating and slick, a persistent reminder of his guilty conscious long into the afternoon despite the bottles of water he has drowned it with.

 

But he didn’t eat it, this time, and he spits the phantom out into the bathroom sink of the changing rooms, washes his mouth out from the faucet.

 

“Yurio?” He starts slightly at the intrusion, and when he glances up to look at himself, the plastic coated mirrors do little to flatter the twisting expression he pulls at the use of the sour nickname. Rather, the scratchy surfaces serves only to darken the bags beneath his eyes, add a pearly, washed out quality to the drying pallid of his skin. He deigns not to answer Yuuri immediately, averts his eyes from the bathroom entrance and reaches for a disposable tower to wipe at his mouth and hands.

 

“What were you doing?” Yuuri is closer now, and Yuri can just picture is timid posture in the sounding of his words. He wants to be left alone, right now, and he scrunches the towel in his damp palm, watches vicious salvia and water stain into the fibres of the paper, forced creases acting as basins as his fist cradles it.  He moves to throw it in the bin, but Yuuri is closer than expected and a hand is reaching out to his shoulder – on instinct, he snakes away, avoiding the touch with a movement a throw stones away from being a flinch.  Discomfort crawls beneath his skin as he stares at the reaching limb, the shuttered emotion on Yuuri scrunched face.

 

“What do you want?” He manages to spit out, delayed and flat of the intended spite. He feels oddly caged, flushed between the wall and the sinks, Yuuri between him and the exit.

 

“Yurio,” he begins with a voice he has come to associate with the gentleness Victor and Yuuri pass between each other, “Please tell me you weren’t just throwing up.”

 

“What?” It slips out from his before he can stop it, the accusation stinging harshly against his pride – as if he’d need to do that, as if he’d be weak to -- he’s better than that, damn it. He has this down to an art, a fucking science, even, he doesn’t lose control, gorge, doesn’t need to. Not like he’s heard from others, whispered in Malia’s salacious voice.  It’s embedded in him now, a part of him, a wolf lurking among his vulnerable organs which press against membrane and wet bone. Its claws clip at his veins, curl across ducts and nodes, teeth pointed atop valves and digging into the soft flesh of his heart. Integration.

 

A takeover.

 

“Is that a no? Yurio?” And suddenly, he is angry. It’s burning deep in his gut, a thrown switch, acid dripping from his pores and he itches to punch something, scream at someone, dig out the foreign body inside him that made him feel so horribly raw. He would rather die than eat enough to bend him over a toilet, and the mere suggestion of indulging to the point of sickness sparks up an unnatural defensiveness, something swirling and humiliated. He must look so pathetic to Yuuri, so _fat_ –

 

“I don’t have to do something like that, _pig_ , because I can control myself around food.” The _‘unlike you’_ was heavily implied, almost palatable in the air between them. Yuuri doesn’t look hurt, or sorry, as he usually does in these interactions; instead, he has the gal to look concerned. Yuri grits his teeth harshly, grinds as he glances towards the bathroom doorway.  He needs to get out before the guilt sets in, the sinking badness that crawls, tarlike, up the staircase of his nervous system.  This poison just spills from his lips, filter be damned.

 

“Yuri,” And he’s stepping towards him again, eyes flicking across him, “Yuri, what do you mean?”

 

He looks away. “What do you think? I won’t let myself go like – like – I wouldn’t do that,” Frustration switches his words into a gravelly murmur, and he’s horribly, disgustingly conscious of his body in that moment – like he’s being measured up, to see if that’s really true. And god, is it? He always knew there was more to lose, more to work on, and the initial shock, Lilia’s first little excavation project, has left him shakenly unsure as where he stands. He thought he knew what his body was, once.  The uncertainty is dry on his lips as he considers the scene. Fat little Yuri backed into the corner like he’s seven all over again.

 

“And what’s it to you, anyway?” He interrupts as Yuuri opens his mouth again, not wanting to hear the answer “Whatever. Lilia’s waiting. Move, Pig.” Finally, he slips past the older skater, precise as to not brush against him. He isn’t stopped on his way out this time, and he doesn’t dare turn around though his skin crawls with the following eyes. A heaviness drops on his shoulder the moment the door swings shut, and the sluggishness that caresses his joints is damning.

 

Later, when he lands a triple lutz under the direction of sharp words and half compliments and has returned to the rinks edge to shiver and bear Yakovs scrutiny, he excuses himself to eat lunch with Mila. Rather, he retreats to the public bathrooms in the venue, far from the ones attached to the changing room, and counts carefully the consumed breakfast components seated on a closed toilet basin. His fingers drum faster against his sides as he adds in the sixty from the electrolyte replenishing drinks his coaches insisted on, packed with sugar that seared the back of his throat.

 

He blocks out the way the boiling fury from Yuuri had decayed into a sickening bitterness in the hours that had passed. He texts Otabek, ignores the reply but revels in the feeling that at least someone isn’t disappointed in him – yet – and that someone maybe even cares about him. It’s difficult to pinpoint when he began to believe these things about himself, possibly between sighs and corrections and heavy medals on his vertebrae, but it plays from his mind like a fact.

 

The sky is blue, the grass is green, his worth is fundamentally dictated by his weight.

 

And he’s crying in the bathroom stall, the symbolism sickening him to the core.

 

* * *

 

 

Sitting in the bathroom, shower running and head propped against the door, he hears:

 

“… Victor did the same. Hell, all figure skaters do, he’s just growing, he’s –“

 

“You mean to say I am wrong?”

 

“He’s working hard, is what I’m saying. He’s under a lot of pressure.”

 

“I do not need your permission to act. I will speak with him, I am his coach also. You mentioned Victor was worried, yes?”

 

“He only said that he was –“

 

* * *

 

 

He skypes Otabek, laptop rested on his pillows and elbows digging into his mattress, aching already with the stress of holding him up. It’s quiet on both ends, Otabek leaving his laptop on the coffee table of his apartment as he sits on a sofa, comfortable yet somehow regal in dark pyjamas, reading a book hardly larger than his palm with glasses propped haphazardly on his nose.  His hair is wet, curling onto his forehead in stringy, wet strands that shouldn’t be so endearing, especially as moisture still drips down from them every now and then to fall like a misplaced tear down the straight bridge of his nose.  And though the scene usually warms him, brings him a level of peacefulness he fails to find elsewhere, he finds this private heaven invaded too.

 

When Otabek turns a page, he drinks in the gentle press of his tendons around his knuckles, compares it to his own, smaller hands, which seem suddenly too soft, fatty.  Every slight shift brings his eyes elsewhere – Otabek is solidly built, strength over flexibility, but he still finds that the gentle slopes of his legs seem more contained than his, slimmer in their muscularity, and from what he remembers his thigh gap is well defined. It floods him with a dark jealously, and he shifts uncomfortably in his oversized hoodie, pulled all the way up to cover the lower half of his face in order to disguise the remains of a faint breakout as well as the rapidly drying skin. He needs to drink more water, if it’s any indicator of anything, and he’s tired of seeing an ugly, drained mess in every countless mirror around him.  It’s embarrassing, humiliating, words of beauty pressed to his bones only for him to amount to so very little.

 

What had he been expecting? It seems, the more he presses himself, the more he loses himself. The last few valuable threads slipping between his fingers, final and absolute. He learns he doesn’t have the energy to grasp after them.

 

“Are you alright?”

 

The pixel blur disguises Otabek’s full expression, but Yuri can only really see the sharpness of his cheekbones anyway, that definite jaw. Things he lacks.

 

“’m tired, Beka.” He mumbles, ripping his gaze away and playing with the strings of his hoodie.

 

“Are you sure?” He prompts, “You’re a little quieter than normal. Even for a tired Yuri,” Despite it all, Yuri feels a quirk pull at his lips for the endearing phrase and, when he looks up, Otabek is a little less angles; composed of more than sharpness. It brings him back to himself a small amount, those few words, and he suddenly wishes Otabek were here next to him.

 

He feels he can be soft, with Otabek. There are no years of bitterness to support, no foreign translation from sandpaper to silk.

 

“When you’re ready. We’ll talk.”

 

Yuri whittles away that scrap of warmth, wraps his hoodie tighter around him and hopes it’s enough to thaw his heart.

 

* * *

 

 

 Yuri can list a lot of things he hates. He’s always been that way, very much opinionated on certain subject areas, tending more towards pure hatred or neutrality more than being able to freely and openly enjoy something. He likes it better, keeping things he treasures to close himself, pressing the things that hurt him under his skin, deep enough words can’t wedge at them – the one thing he wears, ice skating, is chipped and torn and a built in design flaw. A self-destruct, if you will, and that’s another thing he loathes; how vulnerable it makes him to love.

 

And It’s that, as much as Yuri enjoys feeling floaty and airless, like there’re holes in his skull and clouds in his veins, he _hates_ feeling hungry. The kind after he eats, when his stomach awakens from hibernation, seems to remember it has a purpose and pushes and _pushes_. Clenches upon itself, stings at him with stomach acid, and it’s so damn sharp and _present_ it’s near impossible to block out, to force away images of a constricting, begging emptiness from his mind. Cramping in on himself with the lack of food, and it makes him feel a little like he’s getting smaller. Being pulled inwards –

 

A black hole.

 

But eventually it fades away, because he can’t stay hungry forever. It hurts, and sometimes it takes too long and keeps him up late, distracts him in his routines, but he doesn’t keep wanting for more. His body forgets again, slips away, and he can be a helium balloons once more, wavering in the breeze up above his childhood park. If he thinks too much on the reoccurring headaches, the dirty guilt leftover in his mouth from ever being hungry and the deep seated nausea, then it’s all too real that’s he’s being swept away more than he floats.

 

He panics, when people start to bring it up, when Mila insists she made him lunch or Lilia won’t let him leave the table. When Yuuri starts keeping fruit with his jumper on the sides of the rink, offers Yuri some under a creeping, heavy gaze from Victor. He panics because it’s not like he can eat enough to humour them, anymore, and it’s a dawning horror how his hands tremble and his fingers feel the coldness of a fork too harshly when he tries to bring bites to his mouth, and finds he can’t. He doesn’t know what is in it, didn’t watch it be prepared and he’s – he’s fucking scared there’s something extra in it, on top of how rotten all food seems these days. He’s worried that people want to sabotage him, force him to gain, listens around corners to conversation on his thighs and his balance and knowing that a milligram of salt too much will blow him up too much to skate the next day. So he can’t eat the lunch Mila made or eat the fruit Yuuri offers, and he wishes he could just to keep them off his back, because there’s only so long snapping and maiming and yelling are going to keep them away. The paranoia in his every action is tiring – he wants to sleep, curl up somewhere with no mirrors or people or food. A safe place.

 

A luxury he cannot afford.

 

His edges feel so rough, so cutting and he doesn’t know how to stop it. He half realises, sometimes, that he’s terrified of doing this anymore. He’s scared of something bad happening, of how adjusted he is to the pain he feels when he steps back and tries to remember the last time something didn’t hurt aside from skating, and is met with a long stretch of blank. He takes to checking online, googles his hair falling out and his joints hurting and feeling cold all the time and he knows it’s stupid but he’s scared, every now and then, that he’s going to die.

 

Yuri doesn’t want to die, not in a very real way. It’s a bad kind of small feeling, knowing and denying.

 

It’s too retched. He cries and bites his fingers alone, and then washes his hands and keeps his head down and _snarls_ when anyone suggests otherwise. He doesn’t want to die, not really, but he can do it, one more time. He just needs people to give him space, leave him alone, let him get on with it without the lingering gazes and hushed replies to questions he didn’t catch. This isn’t all for nothing. He will finish this, perfect it. This is pain with a goal, he’s being weak, there’s nothing to worry about this – _this s fine, this is fine, this is fine._

 

Simultaneously, he craves for someone to do more than notice. More than wait for him to come for them.

 

(They don’t.

 

He can’t bend as well. It hurts so much. Lilia gets angry, she asks him what he’s doing to himself with red around her eyes.

 

 _My stretches_ , he says, _maybe I’m just getting older_ , he says.

 

She keeps tapping the bar and the tiny reverberations ring through his entire body as he pulls his legs up to rest, twists and bends with a shaking hand on the metal. She taps the table at home, the barrier at the rink, the wheel in the car. Tap, tap, taps until Yakov starts to look worried at Yuri, too.

 

He asks; _are you ill?_

 

Yuri files each concern away, reviews them when he’s contorting for the mirror. If they’re worried, it’s working, if they ask, it’s real. There’s a tint of revulsion to his narcissism here, when he preens about a control he should never have lost in the first place, and he thinks it’s pity when he lets it wash over him, thick and dark and choking.

 

Self-disgust is self-obsession, and Yuri hates himself so much he can’t stop thinking about it.)

 

* * *

 

 

Victor touches his hand leaving Lilia’s studio, steadying him as he almost trips on the doorway hinge, and they’re both as cold as each other.

 

He remembers: _Russias top figure skater!,_ watches Victors old programs again and again, fixates on how his ponytail is twice the width of his arm. It’s uncomfortable to look at, after performance videos where foundation has begun to dry out underneath his eyes, hints of hollows Yuri is too familiar with. Aligning these caricatures to the Victor he witnesses now, the parallels are shallow, skin deep. He has a tendency to complain about Victor’s exuberance and eccentricity, and this is only because of how easy a bone it is to pick; it used to be wilder, baying, something Yakov would curve in harshly and Chris would worry after because after competition drinks.  Victor is softer, now, pulls closer to those around him in a homely fashion, appears settled in his bones and at a warm ease with his fading edges.

 

But his hands are still cold like Lilia’s, like his own. Haunting leftovers;

 

He thinks they might understand. And a part of him, somewhere too close to the surface for comfort, is proud that he – Yuri Plisetsky – has not given up where so many of his idols have.

 

That he stays hungry, barren.

 

(He doesn’t want to acknowledge that thought exists.)

 

* * *

 

 

It doesn’t come to head in a big way, and there’s no accident or big walk in and no one corners him and breaks it down for him;

 

Instead, he’s scared of dying. He can’t stop thinking about it, can’t get it out from underneath his nails, can’t stop feeling it in every shaky beat of his heart, in every moment his chest aches and he wonders if _this is it, this is it._ Dying staring up at a ceiling, metallic tap water on his tongue and his own dry breaths rolling out over his lips. Moving out and away from the body he is alienated from, losing the warmth from his cat pressed along his leg, forgetting the feel of sheets on his skin; gone. Sixteen. Premonitions of his death haunting him, mocking him in all that he had begged and pleaded for it. He plays headlines in his head, wonders over what his mother would say - if she would attend his funeral, maybe just to look nice for lawyers to ensure the money - wonders what his rink mates would think. If they really even cared about him. He pictures an empty graveyard, a priest talking to nobody, frost on a coffin and a dusty cold medal.

 

It makes him shaky, and panicky, and he wants nothing more than to call someone, for someone to hold him, for someone to _help_ him before he clamps down again, before the visceral horror of the building fat coating every inch of his sickly pale body is too disgusting, too pathetic to bear. Before he knows he’d rather die than carry on like this, before he convinces himself he’s fine, again, that this is fine, that’s healthy, that’s he’s so big it wouldn’t matter anyway. It doesn’t feel like him. But it is, all the time, all the fucking time, and he’s so, _so_ scared.

Yuri wants comfort, and Otabek is whispering flight times into his ear before he can blot the tears off his stinging face.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi im so sorry for the month delay. im super depressed and reflecting on my ed all the time is ٩(^ᴗ^)۶
> 
> i made edits to last chapter. haven't spell checked this chapter and have no idea if it makes sense but i'll come back to it like i have the others, there's more scene i might place in between cuts, sorry for any in-coherency i wrote this like 200 words at a time 
> 
> and a really big thank you for anyone who left comments . i know my writing isn't great and the plot is lacklustre but it means so much people take the time to read it. i have nothing in my life and it's Sad but when i cant get up in the morning it helps to read through the feedback, so thanks for getting me to my 9am lectures i guess ! but n one has to leave comments, just wanted to express my thanks like for real. 
> 
>  
> 
> [find me on tumblr](http://killuay.tumblr.com)
> 
>  
> 
> tunes relevant to chapter;  
> [they'll like me when im sick](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL4fXw1xjOs)
> 
>  
> 
> edit to add; otabek and yuri are not in a romantic relationship. yuri is 16 in this fic and and i canon 18 year old otabek as not creepy. sorry for the confusion. additionally Big Reminder no one saves you from eds, the relationships in this fic exist purely as supports and are not the plot.


	4. Chapter 4

He longs to take it back.

It was a mere episode, an occurrence that appears to only increase in frequency as time slips by, and something which worsens with the waning sun – if a sun appeared at all among the snow-heavy clouds.  There was almost no need at all for an indoor ice rink when the streets of St. Petersburg offered a borderline deadly mix of ice and snow, frosty build-ups visible from the gaps of Yuri’s bedroom curtains. The faux translucent shadow they cast at the bottom of his bed was just present enough for him to dip his toes into, the darkness playing at the abrupt angles of his ankle, reddened skin and bruises soothed to a flawless grey, one that climbed his calves slowly as he lay prone on the sheets.

He strokes his cat absentmindedly, eyes half shut in an attempt to nurse away the stinging soreness of entirely too much crying, the swollen tear ducts a tangible presence whenever he thought to press a hand to the offending eyes. The skin below is drier to the touch than the rest of his face, tacky with dried tears and faint traces of clinging fabric from where he had burrowed his face away into the pillow, smothering his words to Otabek across the line.

At the thought, his heart clenches and he finds himself breathing through the strange sensation of pressure dropping somewhere in his chest, hand tight against a droopy cat ear. It’s not dread, but something close, and he’s familiar enough with embarrassment to recognise its lingering influence; he’s not sure what overcomes him so often in the early hours of the morning, but it never fails to make his eyes itch, never fails to tempt him to spill his guts out to someone – _anyone_. It’s a pathetic, repulsive urge he can’t quench down on, one he holds in with nails against his arms, firm passes over his cat’s fur. He is pinballed between the sharpness inside his hollowed stomach and this nigh irresistible impulse, shying away from focusing on either but equally unwilling to give himself away to the morbid nature of his thoughts, skirting his conscience, packs of prowling wolves that accumulate throughout the day. Ones which pounce at night.

But now it’s morning, with an outgoing international call logged on his phone and a text message with a time, date and place neatly arranged into three lines. He half wants to text back, call off the visit – something he knows must be inconveniencing Otabek’s schedule at such short notice, despite them being so far off from any competitions of note – but he hides this desire behind his aching eyes. He’ll text him back later, when light doesn’t make his eyes water, that’s what he tells that part of himself gnawing at him for the lack of control. The part writhing in the embarrassment of vulnerability, seething at the lies and half sobs and every stupid secret Yuri had thought to foolishly share in the pretence of not knowing Otabek well enough to know he wouldn’t sit heavy with the knowledge. And it’s selfish, to share with the expectation of help, but it’s something he craves so desperately that for now, he can tell himself;

He’ll send the text later. When his eyes don’t hurt.

Later.

 

* * *

 

Practice is filled with a higher note of tension than usual, an undercurrent of something hysterical, a string on the edge of breaking. Yuri is alone with Lilia, following the smooth movements of a routine specified for improving flexibility he is losing quietly month by month. It helps, in more ways than he suspects he fully notices, and keeps him mobile enough for his well-known moves, his trademark jumps and spins. After these sessions, the next day on ice is always a little smoother, something fluid pouring along his joints that translates seamlessly to the bend of his legs, the flex of his spine.  

Despite this, the sessions are hard to enjoy. This studio of Lilla’s reminds him horribly of the months running up to the Grand Prix Final, echoes of himself quirking their lips at him every time he is forced to check his posture in the mirror, mocking and arrogant. In the light, he recaptures his moment alone with these many reflections jostling his gaze as jumps and bends and moves in grasping elegance. He can’t lose, he won’t lose, yet there had always been a part of him that knew he was building himself up for a failure, stacking insecurities and mistakes and tiny technical errors into a glass house so fragile a single grain of sand could bring it crashing down. It leaves a bad taste in his mouth, a notch more than dehydration.

Each time he stops for a drink, Lilia studies him too keenly. It puts him on edge, more so than the steely touches to his waist, fingers along his spine. Lilia observes with the purpose of commenting, never finds herself dedicating energy to something she won’t improve. Yuri is something she must improve, a pet project she will never finish.  He is less and less of a dancer, a Prima Ballerina; he is the decay in the universe, the tendency of energy to degrade to chaos. There is nothing orderly in the thickness of his waist, the dryness of his lips, the lines on his nails that cause them to shatter and break at the minutest of pressure.

Falling apart, growing up, inching towards rot over regeneration.

(Apoktosis, he remembers from his tutors quiet voice, is coordinated cell death. Clean. Safe.

Yuri, rather, is necrosis, spilling toxins and enzymes, gnawing away at organelles and bursting cell walls – destructive, putrefying.)

When he leaves that day, Lillia tells him his hair is getting thin. She doesn’t say anything more, but the implication is enough.

 

_How long will this go on for, Yuri?_

 

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t send the text.

He hails a cab for the airport, instructs it to wait, makes it worth their while. If the cab driver recognises him, there’s no indication, and it’s such a petty small thing he almost doesn’t feel bad when he remembers the way that Victor, without fail, is always recognised. Worshipped. They call Yuri’s win a fluke, beginners luck – everyone was thrown off by Victor’s leaving, by the rising of Yuuri, the new blood springing up is surprising, erasing out the real competition before it reached the finals. His gold is a faux one, spray paint on wood. If he wasn’t wearing gloves, he thinks his nails would be halfway through his palms.

Arrivals is quiet on a Tuesday afternoon. Otabek is easy to spot, tired but stoic, checking the tags on his suitcase and fussing with the zips at the entrance. Yuri doesn’t know how to approach him, after their call, doesn’t know if he should be crying, or sad, or happy to see him. He’s mostly empty except for some kind of trailing anxiety, a little bit of arrogance edging at him where passersby glance at him curiously, and then a second time. Pity or surprise, it’s something. He takes a deep breath of dry, clean air, and approaches Otabek.

“Hey,” He greets with a forced casualness, and Otabek looks up from his case, eyes widening immediately in an indecipherable emotion. He’s different to read, made of more pixels than Yuri can imagine, tucked away beneath a public mirage.

“ _Yuri_ ,” He says. Yuri doesn’t know what that means.

“Yeah. Me.” He reaches up to pull at the end of his ponytail, wishes the felt of his gloves would allow him to wind the strands around his fingers, “Uh, hey, Beka.” The words sound too awkward, shy, as if Yuri has ever been such a thing, and he winces at them internally.

Otabek doesn’t seem to notice, “We should get a taxi.”

“There’s one outside, waiting. Let’s go?” Otabek nods a little solemnly, loops a hand around the handle of his case and falls into step with Yuri, glancing around at the airport but keeping any comments to himself. There’s something familiarity in this, walking side by side, the quiet tiredness after a flight that has Yuri feeling less awkward. A little more relaxed. He had, perhaps, been expecting a bigger reaction; for Otabek to be more noticeably worried, to harbour that fire in his voice as he did over the phone, that brimming concern that had squeezed tears and secrets from Yuri, had wrung him dry as a bone on a cold late night.

He’s placid, instead. Careful, like he tends to be; Yuri knows this means he is thinking, that is no indication he is angry, or disappointed, or regretting – but a small part of him writhes with the lack of reaction, urges him towards a darkening spiral. He does his best to clamp down on it, reminds himself of Otabek’s halting admissions over Skype sessions on how people have always misinterpreted this about him, how he’s often characterized as a robot in the foreign press. He just prefers to listen, doesn’t always like to fill a conversation to the brimming point, happy to let a moment simmer and boil away at its own pace.

Yuri had liked that he trusted him with that. He holds that knowledge close now, as they load the taxi and instruct it back to Lillia’s house. Yuri assumes she is fine with Otabek staying, he hadn’t asked because, right up until the point he didn’t, he had intended to tell Otabek to cancel. To stay in Kazakhstan. They have too many spare bedrooms, but he has the vague thought he hopes Otabek shares with him. Makes the night a little more bearable, less hungry.

The cab ride isn’t too long: the international airport is fairly close to the city, and Lillia’s apartment is ridiculous, and expensive, and in a prime location. Yuri pays, for some grasp at control, but when he makes to help Otabek with his luggage he is gently waved away. Otabek’s cold hands squeeze to a sickly pallor around the handle of his case, and Yuri thinks of oceans and sun and sprawling city outlines.

In the lift, Otabek asks, “Do they know I’m here?”

Yuri tells him no.

(It’s an admission of more than he’s willing to give.)

At the apartment, the curtains are pushed all the way open and the blinding light of reflecting snow almost hurts where it hits every scrubbed and polished corner of a pristine home in a radiant glint. Yuri thinks she turns it outwards, to deal with it – the need to control. He can’t ever see it fading, not when it feels like this, so she must have redirected it: calories for cleaning products, the filth inside cleansed outwardly. He understands. He can’t sympathise. His room is messy, energy leaking out, reverting to chaos – clothes and books and stuffed toys from fans. He hasn’t had enough sleep to care what Otabek thinks about it, so he opens the door without much preamble, keeping up that constant, fragile silence.

He shuts the door. His blinds are closed. Otabek pulls him into a hug –

 

_“Oh, Yuri.”_

 

 

* * *

 

 

It’s _embarrassing_.

There is a certain relief in being held. Comforted. Something he didn’t know he really needed, had only dreamed in the vaguest of ways of needing, as if it were a concept so alien he couldn’t possibly entertain it as a reality. It’s a touch that doesn’t measure, weigh, one that isn’t constructed to trap or corral, bind or appraise. A stranger to his skin.

He doesn’t know what to say. He feels more hollow than ever, that the presence of Otabek alone hadn’t shifted anything, that he’d been stupid enough to upheave his friends life, too – for what? A stint of not eating?

 

_‘hell, all figure skaters do, he-‘_

 

Victor’s hands, Lillia’s clavicle. Nothing new.

“I’m glad you called me.” Otabek informs him like it’s a fact, rather than his opinion. Yuri finds he prefers it that way. Though quiet, Otabek is not shy, doesn’t cower from affection like the touch-starved creature Yuri haunts. The surety is comforting, doubt-worthy but less so than the rest of the world. Yuri wants to bury his head further away, fall somewhere further, deeper, than the skin of Otabek’s neck. Away, gone, bone dust on a winters breeze – or, a storm. He’s not deluded enough to believe an undoing of himself to be a peaceful fade, more of a painful struggle, bitter, angry, a thing people could not bear to watch.

Look away, be ashamed. He wonders how others let things get this far. If he even is that far.

He doesn’t know how to say thank you, but Otabek doesn’t let him.

“What do you want to do about this?” He asks, because he’s all about action. Moving forward.

“Nothing,” Yuri mumbles, and Otabek sighs. Worry bursts forth, a tiny rush along the left side of his heart of cool blood; Otabek’s hands are heavy around him, sinking into his flesh. Yuri wants to peek down, compare their thighs, wrap together their hands to side by side their fingers, the fatty flesh at the ends, the prominence of the knuckles. Over the phone, Otabek had said _eating disorder_. He’s glad they step around it for now, phrase it as if a problem without a name exists, as if Yuri cannot be catalogued away. If it’s not official, textbook, they can solve it between them.

“You know we can’t do that.” And, Otabek sounds old for a second, “We will talk to Lillia, or Yakov?” He poses it as a question, tells it as an absolute.

Yuri pulls away.

“I don’t know…”

He hears more than sees Otabek press his dry lips together, a light rasp in the static of his snowed-in room. Over the phone, he couldn’t shut up and here, now - he doesn’t know what to say. Can’t think of how to change his situation. Isn’t entirely sure he wants to. But it’s with a sinking feeling he observes that Otabek will never let him ignore this.

It doesn't matter how bad it _really_ is, not when he cried down the phone about _dying_. Anyone would be worried. Otabek probably wants to get this over with so he doesn’t have to feel guilty when he travels back to Almaty. Yuri’s always been desperate for attention.

Is any of this real?

“We can decide tomorrow, but I think we do have to, Yuri. You look... like you might need some help. We can get you it,” Otabek’s frown is careful and neat, fits exactly into his squared bones and sharp cheekbones without much scrunching. Yuri focuses hard on it when he feels his jaw tremble, threads his fingers together fretfully in an attempt to subdue an emotion that suddenly and undeniably present.

 _Help_. Right.

It doesn’t work, and Otabek pulls him back in just as his face flushes anew with tears.

 

* * *

 

 

Otabek sleeps in the spare room. Lillia clicks her tongue but doesn’t say a word when Yuri tells her he’s here. Her gaze is more than sufficient, but Yuri isn’t stupid enough to notice she’s being softer than usual. Four months ago, she wouldn’t even have considered hosting a stranger. He won’t bring it up.

They spend the day being idle in the rink. Otabek claims his routine is not yet practised enough to skate to completion, but he weaves tantalising little bites of it between talk that is so wonderfully smooth and freeing that Yuri realises how tense it has been the last few months. His rink mates have been tip toeing around him, touching him less, talking less. He tries not to think about it.

Otabek drags him out to eat dinner, after. Most street food stores are closed down following the work rush hour earlier, but around tightly packed streets small restaurants cut through the snow with warm aromas. Some western take outs, turkish cafes and traditional, tourist-orientated cafes set up in gaudy wood-side colours to appeal to the winter holiday makers. The smell of cooked beef and fish makes Yuri feel sick to his stomach with worry, acid churning and stinging at his insides as he leads Otabek out from one street and into a snowy plaza.

He breathes in deep, and leans against a wall. He feels - lightheaded, maybe. The prospect of eating paired with the exertion from earlier, food carefully ignored in favour of the novelty of Otabeks’ visit to the rink, has left him feeling shaky. Unstable, even. He longs to sit down, to rest a moment, but he bought Otabek all the way out here; it wouldn’t be fair to confine him to the confines of his badly lit room for the entirety of the stay.

He watches a snow plow clear a path from a side road to the plaza entrance. Over his coat, Otabek lays a gloved hand.

“Let’s go back, I don’t feel like eating out anymore.”

It’s a nice lie.

Lilia is in the living room, murmuring back and forth with Yakov as a radio plays on the coffee table. Politely, Otabek greets them both. A curling of embarrassment flushes up under cold-tinted cheeks, and Yuri does his best to ignore their slow conversation as he moves around the kitchen, pulling out leftover kabachkovaya ikra and bread for Otabek. Something safe. Something cold. He’d watched Lilia make it yesterday over breakfast for a lunch he never took, slicing his strawberries with the edge of his spoon and pointedly avoiding the cooling kasha taking up a little less than half the bowl.

He portions it carefully, anxiously checking and re-checking how the bowls compare. Enough that it’s not suspicious, but not enough to be too much - he’s not hungry in the slightest, if he’s honest, despite the pain just above his abdomen. The thought of having to eat in front of Otabek is a scary one; something trill but depressing. Dread, he thinks.

If he eats, he’s fine. He brought him here for nothing. If he doesn’t, he’s being ungrateful, attention seeking, difficult.

It’s just a fucking bowl of squash.

“Oi,” Yuri says, a little softer than intended to catch away his attention from the two older adults, “Help me carry these.”

Lillia watches him with an indecipherable expression as Yuri slinks off to his room, head down to avoid her gaze and a quietly confident Otabek behind him, bowls in hand.

He doesn’t eat the kabachkovaya. Otabek reads a book propped up against the pillows of his bed, the place where his image usually sat within a laptop, and Yuri lies at his side scrolling mindlessly through his phone. His eyes feel dry, and he feels heavy and stupid and childish, but within Otabek’s presence is a palatable comfort. An alleviation of the panic buzzing at his sternum, a relief from the morbid certainty of the last few months.

 _Tomorrow._ It lay heavy in the air.

 

* * *

 

 

 

_One, two, three._

 

He pulls hard at his finger. The base pales, creases turn red, the blueness of veins surf up against his translucent skin, play strangely at the overall colour - it shifts unhealthy in shades of off green and yellow. It hurts, of course it hurts, but it’s something other than the teeth-biting silence.

Lillia sets her tea down on the side table next to her preferred seat, letters stacked in a neat pile almost taller than the cup. In the kitchen, Yakov pours out the boiling water into his own mug. Outside, it’s grey. Yuri stares at the blanketing clouds as the occupants around him settle.

“Yuri.” Lillia says shortly, expectantly. Yuri has to bite his lip to avoiding retorting back her own name in the same tone. it will only makes things harder. More aggressive. It’s tense enough already, to the point of self-consciousness, even. He’s in his biggest jumper, but it’s still as if anything he says will be held against him by the slightest hint of his weight.

A problem with eating. That’s all he has to say. But he does have to say it; and then they’ll stare at him, weigh him with their eyes, and they’ll wonder what problem. Eating too much? Too little? It’s seems obvious. He’s drawn, hungry, article heading and instagram comments. But maybe it’s just in comparison. He’s skinnier than he was, maybe, to other people, he’s firmed up, or something - which is worse because he’ll look a little smaller, and they’ll expect some vision of smallness when beneath clothes and acrid words, he is soft. A sickening curiosity.

Bigger than he’s ever been. A great mass starved to a pinpoint. Yuri is so _heavy_.

He needs to share it. Raze out the trickling dread along his vertebrae.

 

_Throw yourself away._

 

“Yuri, what -”

“I’m, uh -” He starts, interrupting Yakov while he can still force it out, his sternum sinks, “I’m having trouble eating. Or something. That’s why Otabek is here. So that. It’s not, like, I’m not - it’s not bad. I’m fine but-” His words run together too fast, too halting and they’re not saying anything. Not yet. They need to break his speech, stop him before he overrides himself. Before he pulls damage control on the thing he’s most scared of.

“-not. I needed to tell you. I don’t know if I need help or just a new diet-”

At that, Otabek shifts closer, catching his attention and cutting off his words. Yakov swears in the next quiet moment that follows, looks awkward and red and out of his comfort zone, and Yuri can’t bring himself to look at Lillia. Only her legs. They’re long, betray bone and definition even underneath suit trousers. She must have done this once, too - or maybe she was dragged away. Force-fed. Strong, sick, till the end.

Worse than him, and she must thinks he’s pathetic. A _food problem_ . A _diet_. All figure skaters have to -

“Yuri. I am glad you have brought this to us. Yakov and I,” Lillia pauses, collects, he remembers a conversation heard through a bathroom door, “have been concerned about... your behaviour. I... we, will help you seek treatment. We’ll get you what you need.”

Yakov fiddles with his cup. Nothing feels particularity real.

 

_Swallow, swallow._

 

“Okay.”

Otabek nods, holds his eyes as snow begins to fall against the distended windows. His throat is dry, his hands are sore, and he is neither happy nor sad.

Treatment.

 

* * *

 

 

She makes a tut sound under her breath. Lillia visibly twitches across the room, aged skin tight against salient knuckles. Yuri wants nothing more than to look back at the readout on scale behind him, but there’a stern hand on his arm. They wouldn’t let him if he tried. And he wouldn’t, because he still has some pride. Death row haughtiness in the angle of his chin, the hollows of his neck. He stares at a pipe visible from a broken ceiling tile. The physician scribbles herself a note, and he doesn’t try and decipher the numbers she’s writing.

That would be pathetic.

He’s not. _He’s not, he’s not, he’s not._

“We’ll wait on your blood test results, but our advice would be to abstain from physical activity for the time being given your... predicament. Your weight is in a underweight percentile, and so, as an athlete, we will require you to go through some additional tests. I have been informed you are seeking outside healthcare, and your parent- or caretaker, in this case - will be provided with the necessary documents to transfer your care to another facility. As you are under eighteen some financial support will be provided by the government, but you will not be personally required to sign these documents.” She pauses, bringing a sheet over the scale, “Is there anything more you would like to know? Mr. Feltsman should have the rest.”

Yuri shakes his head. He dresses again in the locker room beside the office shared by the visiting physiotherapists and other health professionals. The rink is filled with chatter and skating, a echoing nothing between queued music that fills him up to the brim with loneliness. The kind that occurs in a crowd, a conversation, an embrace. Longing for more than just talk. More than just contact.

It rings against his ears. Numbly, Yuri notes his hands remain very much steady, but fumbling and disconnected as they drag fabric over bruised skin as if not his own. It’s someone else slipped up inside him, tugging nerves and muscles in an approximation of movement. Everything certainly feels distant enough, a panning shot in a movie, and he’s grappling to stay in shot, to keep the camera turned to him just a second longer.

He’s standing still - bare skin dimpled by cold, distinctly ugly, and he hurries to cover it up, counting time he’s not sure he lost, or ever really had. It’s chill perseveres through the icy walk home, fresh waves breaking over and over - it’s a shock, every time his body realities it’s cold. Hair rises and blood flushes, but it only turns to a pallid shade along his palms, gathers in purples and blues at fingernails and veins. Like flowers, after a win. Like the sequins of a costume.

Yuri wants to scream. Punch. Kick. Do _anything_ to alleviate the sour skew to his thoughts, to feel something that isn’t the inherent numbness deadening everything in its path. He wants to cry. But he’s only the outside of a container, flesh and bone, a host to his hollowness. He reaches further inside, and there’s nothing.

He’s not crying, or shivering, or trembling he unlocks the apartment door.

“How was it?”

Otabek is always so warm, pressed against the kitchen counter, curled around a mug. Still tired from the flight, but there’s something soft in his eyes as a smile settles into a welcoming curve.

“I can’t skate.”

Yuri takes off his coat. Lays it over the stools, he thinks; f _igure skaters are only competitive for a short time._

“I thought they might say that.”

 

_Throw yourself away!_

 

“Where’s Lillia? I thought she went with you.”

 

_Your past self is dead!_

 

“Yuri?”

Who was he before this? Without this? What's even left? What parts of him hasn’t he starved and clawed and bled dry? How much of him can he measure in scar tissue, in blood, how much of the weight he carries is the shadows beneath each eye, the canyons carved along his sides, up his back, in every dip and shallow of his body? What are they going to dig from this body, excavate from his corpse - what could possibly remain, grow, in this barren cadaver?

He killed himself. He’s fucking dead. He has nothing. Is nothing.

“Otabek, I- _fuck_ . I shouldn’t have done this - I can’t skate. I _can’t_ skate! Fuck, _fuck_ .” He looks up at Otabek from where he still stands in the doorway, “What am I when I’m not skating? Who am I? What do I have? I’m nothing, I have”   _the ache below his solar plexus, the pain of his insides_  “- nothing. And I fucked it up, and now I can’t-”

Skate, eat. _Stupid._

Otabek doesn’t touch him. _Careful, careful._ The mug settles onto the counter with a click. He might fracture down the middle, break clean in two, he could crack every brittle, flaking bone in his shaking legs. Snap the ball joint of knee away. Roll it away along the ice, crush petals beneath clean cartilage.

“Yuri. I need you to breath slowly. This isn’t forever. You aren’t nothing. You’re more than your figure skating, breathe. I’ll tell you this again when you can understand me, okay? You’re more than this Yuri, this isn’t forever.”

He’s breathing. Yuri doesn’t know why Otabek keeps asking him to, but his head hurts too much to ask. He wants to sleep. He wants to - disappear, for a little while. Fade. Because when it came down to it, Yuri was weak. He can’t face that. Yuri gave up, gave _in,_ let the part of him unconcerned with winning, perfecting, decide for him. He let that child in him, the sniveling, pathetic kid, take over. What was he scared of? Yuri was never going to die, he’s so _big_ -

A warmth drops against his shoulder. He doesn’t crack in half. He’s only mildly surprised, disappointed.

(” _You need to rest,_

 

_You will skate again soon,_

 

 _You’re so cold, Yuri_.”)

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> agh my last note here was kinda childish im sorry
> 
> basically, i have removed the end of the chapter, due to two people on tumblr sending hate based on the chapters quality and content. and because this is such a personal topic to me, especially since i'm currently in an outpatient program for this very thing, and i'm very sensitive to complaints on my writing quality (i know, i know, unprofessional) i felt less anxious having it taken down than kept up.
> 
> if i do re-write the ending, i'll post it as an additional chapter on this fic, and drop an update on [my writing blog](http://ariswrites.tumblr.com)
> 
> sorry for everyone who had to suffer through that. i really appreciate the kind words and support i'm receiving, it means the world. i felt like i let some of you in to how my life has been with these eating disorder and it's weird to have people understand me on that level
> 
> i had some beautiful fan art sent to me, which i will link when i get the permission to  
> and here is the [playlist for the fic](https://open.spotify.com/user/ribcages/playlist/3If1CyOoFSPcXNymiCWerA) i previously removed  
> also, a thank you to the translations done on reincarnate, which you can now read in french and spanish
> 
> !


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah im just reposting the end previously deleted with one extra scene. please dont send anything bad about it again. i know it's not great and i'll repeat this in the A/N, but ed stories stress me out a lot when i write recovery because i have never recovered so bone apple tea i only know how being forced into recovery and biding your time to relapse works

Time passes strangely.

Sessions with a therapist, private, Lillia would have nothing else, could be fifty minutes formed of years. Months in deep silences, weeks lost fiddling with the frayed edge of jeans, waiting, hesitating. It’s strange to Yuri, somehow, that the person across from him has to think about what he says. Needs time to process. It always seemed like they answered fast, filled any silence with questions and prompts; but mostly, in reality, they let it lie.

He hates it, because it means he trips over himself to fill in the blanks. To lessen the blow of the cliche, overused phrases he says, like, ‘ _ I hate myself _ ,’  _ ‘I just wanted to lose weight _ ’ and, ‘ _ I needed to change _ ’   .  He must owe thousands in copyright, by now. He just can’t let it lie, twists up something in his stomach to be so serious. Embarrassment. His mother would call this whining, would twist his hair in her hand, ask him why he thought his business should be anyone else’s.  _ Pliesetkey’s mind their own. _ A conveniently forgotten saying as she stuck her nose in the neighbours affairs, waist lean and cinched tight by a belt, leant against the kitchen counter. Pale eyes narrowed as she eyed the comings and goings of their street through a open window, glass and cloth in hand acting as a thin facade of cleaning.

He throws out these little memories in between crying dumbly and refusing to speak, jaw tight. They always want to know about his family relationships, but it’s harder to envelop it into words than it is to recount moments stuck in repeat behind his eyes. The grip of a fist in his t-shirt, a sweet smile in front, nails digging into his arm behind her back; his grandfather's tired face, the looks of the other parents at school. Cautious, pitying, vindictive. A vipers nest of emotions that is impossible to boil down to a simple yes or no answer -  _ is your relationship with your mother close? _

Yuri says no anyway. She’s a bitch, doesn’t work, a real piece of work. He doesn’t cry when they ask how tightly she dug those nails in, what she did when she was angry, if she did other things. His eyes sting and a fierceness erupts in his chest, drives him to bitter words and a vulnerable, telling defensiveness. The knowing eyes from in front of the desk between them is enough to anger him on a good day, leave him empty on a bad one. 

They drop the subject, eventually. They like to hop. To jump from one thing to another, as if a fast enough change of subject will somehow trick Yuri to say more. He wishes he had more to say.

It’s difficult. It’s not necessarily about eating anymore, though there’s plenty of that. He warded off in-patient by a few pounds, something he is sorely unsure if he is happy about or not; not because he wanted to be stuck inside a ward, but rather because it stands as a measurement of how sick he is. How much validity backs up his desperate certainty of death. The answer here, is not enough. He considers which meals he ate, what strategic snacks consumed to avert the others suspicions were the contributors of those few pounds. That which kept him firmly above admission guidelines. Was there any reason for his heart wrenching panic, the urgency barely contained by Otabek’s insistence, support, the recognition reflected at him from Victor's eyes, from Lillia’s?

The skin of his thighs turns red in his grasp. Before the pain kicks in he releases it, watches in something akin to fascination as the skin fades markless white. He’s getting better at that - letting go. This is what his time at the health centers and care facilities focuses on when not purely food; moving on, stripping himself of expectations that defined him, moulded him. He is slow to unsheathe his claws, untangle all that is sharp from all that is soft, as it offends some part of him desperate to cling to what he knows. His dogged persistence is the force behind his drive, the spark for his prudently nursed flame. And it is that which drives him to the ground and beyond, six feet under, bones cracking and snapping to squeeze into a grave he’s yet unready for.

Otabek is at his side, smoothing the tension from him, bleeding the claws out from his hand.

“You’re doing well, Yuri.” They anticipated a fight from him. To scream that he wouldn’t eat, couldn’t eat, for him to refuse meals and therapists and their glassly, fragile attempts at comfort. And he would have before, wants to sometimes, when he gags on nutritionally void foods to bridge his calorie gaps, when he’s watched by a tapping, worrying Lillia as he tries to drink a bottle of Ensure in a time short enough to be adequate. 

His stomach aches, grows. They tell him it will redistribute eventually, when his body grows accustomed. He doesn’t care if he doesn’t have to look at it. He can’t eat enough to fill what is emptied forever. To pay off the tax he has shoved off onto his body. He will feel this pain for years. His joints will ache and his hair will thicken only to thin again, he will fall and fly between IV’s and check ups and the taste of homemade Pirozhki. 

The kind words others lay out for him now seem distant, detached. As far from him as his control. Hope is so frighteningly flimsy he grips to its infrequent occurrences, allows himself glimpses into a future without this raging, encompassing emptiness.

Otabek grips his shoulder. His fingertips are warm where they overlap his shirt and press against his skin. Yuri concedes to the touch, turns towards the question lurking behind the quiet touches. 

“It gets better, easier. Even when I’m gone, I’ll still be here,” It sounds like poetry, “You’re a soldier, Yuri. This is just another war.”

“There’s no shame in calling for backup.”

Civil war would have been a better metaphor. But Yuri smiles for him, cocks his head to the side as Otabek observes, something indistinguishable in his features.

“What?”

“You just look -”

“Like?”

“- Someone else.” The tilt of his head follows Yuri’s, the parody translating bizarrely to Otabek’s usual, tidy movements. The edges of Yuri’s lips twitch up, the world held at bay for a moment. Otabek tries. He tries so hard and Yuri can’t place why, but he is grateful for it. There’s comfort at the eye of the storm, hand in hand with a deadly, numbing calm. 

“And what do you think that means?”

“If I knew, I don’t think we’d be in this situation.” 

“Oh?”

“Before, in Barcelona. You had the same look above the city.” _ Before _ , because Yuri’s life is divided into two discrete categories: before he starved himself, and after.  It doesn’t seem like the after yet, the ending of the  _ before.  _ He can turn around, he can skip dinner. Except he doesn’t - doesn’t want to stop eating, doesn’t want to start again.

When smokers quit, they can ignore the smoking areas, drop their smoking friends, avoid small shop counters and throw out all their lighters. They never have to smoke again. Never have to hold it between their lips, fumble for their pack in the dark - never rub their thumbs raw sparking a dying bic, never again revel in the crawl of tar down their lungs. It’s over.

Yuri has to eat five times a day. He has to face food again and again, every single day for the rest of his life. He has to do what scares him the most, what he hates the most, constantly. He’s not allowed to obsess, but life is structured around a breakfast, a lunch, a dinner. Friendships are formed over snacks and events are celebrated, mourned, ignore with food. He can’t shut himself off from it. He can’t box this and hide it away forever. There is no choice but to weather it, to see himself through a daunting task that has no end. To be normal, where the rest of the world has forgotten. Food is function, culture, a social circle, a pleasure, a statement.

He knows not how to navigate something so complex.

“... That’s the face. What are you thinking?”

(Yuri tells him quietly on the floor of his bedroom, cat stretched out above him on his unmade sheets. The snow falling outside is an insulator, a muffle for the pain he leaks out between his clicking teeth.

He expects questions, pity, a statement about who he is as a person. 

Instead, Otabek pulls him close. It’s his favourite place to be.)

* * *

 

_ You have to tell me, _ she says;

_ Was is anything either us said? _

_ Did? _

She sways, guilty in his doorway. 

Yuri doesn’t know what to say. 

_ Throw yourself away _ , he remembers, but it was never just that.

 

* * *

 

This season, he sits on the sidelines. 

It isn’t as therapeutic as he would have liked; he doesn’t find peace in watching others succeed where he does not, but it doesn’t fill him with a desperate fear of falling behind, either. He supposes there is a balance. He will never be the picture-perfect image of a healthy, happy someone; he will grow, and that is inevitable, and he will learn, and with it he will stack the scales to an equilibrium. His bitterness hangs less heavy already. No - he will never not be quick to anger, sharp in the face of softness. Some scars take lifetimes to heal; he cannot resent the marks they leave, the way they shaped him, cannot hate who he has become every day. Not anymore.

He must accept measures of himself. He is not his scars, and he can heal,  _ will _ heal, but it will be slow. There is no finesse in recovery, no way to be perfect, the best; he can’t push himself to the limits to be better, can’t overwork and hurt and still come out on top. Sometimes he will say things he regrets. Push people away. Lie to skip a snack he dreads, an arrangement he can’t make himself go to. 

That’s who he is right now - but he is not static. He is always changing, fluid, flexible beyond his body. It is difficult, but the kind of difficult that can not be cheated through, relished in. It’s an embarrassing difficulty, finding humility and kindness after starkness. Allowing warmness to himself, sharing a softness with others. Being sorry. Apologising to himself, to others. 

Forgiving.

He is not quite there, yet. Won’t be for a while.

On a flatscreen, Yuuri takes off from the gate. It’s been a successful season for him, and Yuri can understand how good that is for him. He’s not happy for him. That’s fine. He traces a path around the ice that is utterly his own, a harsh deviation from Victor's signature, pretty, desperateness. His arms are rigid, harsh, cut something fierce into the fine work of his legs - a contrast that is uncomfortable and purposely so. 

He leaves the rink in discord. Yuri’s eyes ache as the camera pans to Victor. The tinny voice of the spectator echos harsh through his head as the scores line up, cast a blue light into his dimly lit bedroom. If Yuri squints his eyes, it’s his name up there, not Yuuri’s - his in first, gold again. Two years in a row. The new Victor, a better Victor. Nothing like the old one.

Yuri  _ wants  _ still, and little good can come of it. Not yet.

* * *

 

He’s early. He lost track of the time since the morning, seeing Otabek off at the airport. He knows he had to be here, at the rink, to meet with Yakov for some paperwork regarding sponsors for the season he’s missed. Lillia has offered to help support him in the meanwhile. The kindness is tinged with guilt, and if he weren’t so numb, he thinks he might have been offended by the hand out. The implication he can’t work for his own money.

But he is numb. And helpless, stupid, emotional. His grandfather called last night, and he cried down the phone about coming home, to visit him. Real home. He hasn’t cried to his grandfather in years, not since his mother first tried to kick him out. But now that Otabeks gone once more, St. Petersburg feels unwelcoming. A city where everyone sat to watch him die. Where they did nothing when could have done anything.

He hates them for it. Just a little. Adults have always been unreliable.

“... Hello, Yuri.”

The air at his ears is chilling. Reality rolls in like a fog, though, that could just be Victors hair. It shines almost white in the overhead light, well conditioned and silvery enough to appear insubstantial. There’s a reason he was so often likened to the fae in his youth, and Yuri can barely stand the reminder of it. He looks away before he can begin to trace the lines of his body, compare them to his own. Recovery is avoidance, confrontation, choosing the right option for the right situation. Yuri isn’t sure what he wants yet. It’s not quite like he made the choice. He thinks, if he had, he’d still be hungry right now.

These things happen, he knows.

“What do you want, Victor?” He asks, finally, tired of the way the older skater simply watches him, eyes seeing more than he has ever wanted. Something he would have once craved. 

“Yuri I-” If he was looking, Yuri would bet his right leg that Victor had the stupid expression on his face, the one that occurs when he’s trying for something serious, “I can’t help but feel responsible. It’s quite troublesome.”

Yuri scowls, digs his nails into his palm hard to contain what stirs inside.

“This isn’t your doing, old man. Not everything is about you.” The words sound hollow even to his own ears. His idolatry of Victor was well known, annoyingly so, a topic frequently teased upon by Mila and Georgi. It’s an old embarrassment, floods his cheeks with red, to think of his childish demands to a fickle Victor. The tiniest scrap of attention had him entitled then, loud, setting himself up for an investment in someone incapable of giving back.

“Yuuri thinks I should have done more. He is quite insistent on it, but I can’t see it myself. This whole thing is… regrettable. But you’ve always been stubborn.”

He longs for that commitment from someone else. Someone to think he hung the stars, someone he can ignore and hold himself above. It’s not right, but it’s there. He’s always been resentful, jealous. This is how a cycle starts, a cog gone wrong, and he has to wonder - who did that to his mother, first? To Victor and Lillia, clad in a second skin so tight it choked them?

“Was it like this for you?”

“What?”

“Everyone talking to you like they know you. Trying to find out if they’re the guilty party. ”

“No,” says Victor, mouth quirked in a funny little smile, “I never had this. It was a different time, then. I wonder… but it is pointless. We are not the same, you and I.”

Victor never picked himself up. Victor rotted so far into the ground he had no choice but to reincarnate himself with each season, a programme for every person he laid to rest, bouquets thrown at his feet a mockery of a funeral no one truly attended. Until Yuuri. Until someone stepped into the bloody circle Victor trekked, cradled his spilling blood in his cupped hands, overflowed until Victor hadn’t the choice but to step back, assess the gorey path he has trodden, the bloodbaths held by others in his wake. Stains he had left to languish and rot across the years. Blighted. Curdled.

Yuri was never going to make it that long.

There are people who start it all off. Push over the first domino. Sometime, somewhere, a child stumbles over his picture in a magazine. A snapshot on his Instagram. Hundreds of comments on the dimensions of his waist, the vast space that gapes between each thighs, the small hollows dipping behind his knuckles. A canvass to emptiness. Glorified nothing. A barren, desolate being.

They touch his ribcage through the screen. It would, if he were to imagine it, feel something like the caress of a flower. Undeserved. 

He meets Victor's eyes. They are guiltless, vacant in the arena's bright lights.

“No,” Says Yuri, “We are not.”

He stretches out his hand. Releases the pooling blood.

“Not at all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> topnote: yeah im just reposting the end previously deleted with one extra scene. please dont send anything bad about it again. i know it's not great and i'll repeat this in the A/N, but ed stories stress me out a lot when i write recovery because i have never recovered so bone apple tea i only know how being forced into recovery and biding your time to relapse works 
> 
> im sorry, i know this was disappointing to a lot of people but my whole brain feels fuzzy thinking about this fic. i have a hard time writing emotional connections with other people and positive outlook b/c i have little experience with the subjects and it's more depressing everytime i try 
> 
> i appreciate a lot the people who stayed with me, and the folk i've met and connected with because of this fic. don't hesitate to reach out. i'm [killuay](http://killuay.tumblr.com) on tumblr, or just [ariswrites](http://ariswrites.tumblr.com) if you're not interested in me but my writing
> 
> and here is the [playlist for the fic](https://open.spotify.com/user/ribcages/playlist/3If1CyOoFSPcXNymiCWerA)


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